A 0.6–3.8 GHz GaN Power Amplifier Designed Through a Simple Strategy

Abstract

This letter presents the design strategy for an ultrawideband, high-efficiency hybrid power amplifier based on a commercial GaN-HEMT. The measurement results demonstrate a state-of-the-art fractional bandwidth of 145.5%, with saturated output power higher than 10 W from 0.6 to 3.8 GHz and power added efficiency exceeding 46% in the whole band, thus covering most of the mobile frequencies and making this device suitable for small-base station applications. The simple design approach exploits a N-section transformer, and allows for a priori estimation of the bandwidth: in the proposed case, a good agreement between estimated and measured bandwidth is obtained.

3–20-GHz GaN MMIC Power Amplifier Design Through a COUT Compensation Strategy

“…In order to select the value of f h , the magnitude of the intrinsic load impedance Z int = 1/(Y L + j ωC OUT ) can be observed over frequency. Thus, based on the bandwidth estimation method proposed in [9], the output power can be estimated, as follows…”

“…To achieve decade-bandwidth performance distributed PAs are typically used, normally in a non-uniform topology to improve output power and efficiency [1]- [4]. Other wideband GaN PAs have been proposed, relying for example on reactive matching [5] or on a reconfigurable dual-band operation [6], covering smaller bandwidths (6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17)(18).…”

A design of 1 to 4 GHz broadband high‐efficiency power amplifier with two‐way concurrent active load modulation method

“…The excellent bandwidth results mainly rely on high-efficiency impedance extension 39,41,42 and improved design strategy. 40,43 Reference 44 combines supply modulation and load-modulated balanced PA to achieve 1.8 to 3.8 GHz high peak and back-off efficiency bandwidth. Our work offers a two-way PA design method considering concurrent active load modulations, and the measurements of drain efficiency are close to the state-ofart across comparable relative bandwidth.…”

Design of a Broadband Power Amplifier Based on Power and Efficiency Contour Estimation

“…The class-J PA design shown in [1] focusses on producing low-pass and bandpass matching design rules for the output matching and the input matching, respectively, which lead to equations for determining the values of the several components. The design in [2] is based on the observation of the optimum load trajectory versus frequency that leads to a simple matching strategy; a real-to-real impedance transformation, followed by the use of a short stub for allowing [3] uses an optimization algorithm able to optimize the values and to a certain degree also the topology of a matching network based on the L-sections. The topology optimization is enabled by virtual switches that change between the openand short-circuit stubs.…”